Fully Charged’s recent expedition to Australia came across the first all-electric AND fully autonomous vehicle in the country – the RAC Intellibus (which by the way is French, as NAVYA was bought by RAC).

Although the episode begins with Sundrop Farm’s tomatoes, don’t be confused, it’s still about EVs.

RAC Intellibus

The RAC Intellibus is a level four, or fully autonomous vehicle, that can transport up to 11 passengers.

Driving speed can hit up to 45 km/h (28 mph), but the average travelling speed works out to 20-25 km/h.

According to the review, the Intellibus is able drive and entire day on single battery charge, and when its 33 kWh battery becomes depleted, Intellibus parks over a wireless charging station to top back up.

Currently RAC Intellibus is undergoing trials in South Perth. We should note that other NAVYA ebuses are also used in Europe, and this year also made an appearance at 2017 CES in Las Vegas.

These small buses are intended for short, fixed routes (think university campus shuttles); this makes the navigation problem much simpler (losing the GPS signal wouldn’t necessarily be a big deal — you would likely have beacons on the fixed route for precise positioning/backup), and the bus needs to deal with a much smaller range of circumstance than an autonomous car that needs to handle any public road under any conditions.

This type of bus also never needs to go quickly, also simplifying the problem. Pretty much the only thing it needs to do is stop in case of an obstruction. The campus security HQ would have a video feed in such cases, and be able to monitor the bus. This is really much more like the automated light-rail trains a airports that have no drivers than like a car.

However, since you are saving the salary of a fulltime driver, the savings are significant, and these are likely to be the very first autonomous vehicles in real-life use.

Man,that bus had some creaks and groans, hope they sorry that out, it just didn’t sound safe.

No mention what distance each circuit was, and running on a set course is that just a test track or actually between two useful places?

I imagine my city is not that different from any other. We have high density work environments with not much car parking. I could see these buses running from and outskirt location for parking, to the place of work, tirelessly, repetitively, cheaply. How cool would that be?